HOLY SHIT, WE SURVIVED OUR FIRST EVER DECISION. Ariel decided to search grandma’s room instead of spying on her in the garden, and when I turn to that page… there’s immediately another choice!!
“This would be a good chance to find out more about Grandma,” you tell Sophie and Andrew. “Let’s search her room.”
“Right, chief.” Sophie salutes you. […]
“We should hurry,” [Andrew] urges. “I don’t want to get caught in here.”
He’s right.
But where do you begin?
WE DID IT, YOU GUYS. WE’RE FINALLY NOT DEAD!
Let’s look under her bed!
Sophie and Andrew help you drag stuff out from under the bed. But you can’t figure out what any of it is! Strange boxes that don’t seem to open. Bottles filled with strange liquids. You examine something that looks like a laptop. The keys have weird squiggles instead of letters. […]
You reach for the computer-like object.
And freeze!
Footsteps!
Let’s hide under her bed!
From under the bed, you can see Grandma’s shoes enter the room. She kicks them off. […] A moment later [you see] a long, purple, scaly tail!
You’re so startled, you gasp.
Sophie and Andrew immediately clap their hands over your mouth.
“Out! Now!” Grandma rasps.
She heard you.
You and your friends crawl out from under the bed.
You gaze at the horrifying creature in front of you. […]
“Interfering fools!” the Grandma-creature booms. “Now I will have to destroy you ahead of schedule!”
MOTHERFU-
The creature spits over and over again. The strands are like a spider’s web. Soon, you and your friends are completely encased in a sticky cocoon. You can’t see a thing.
“You can’t escape the pod,” the creature informs you. “And the acid in the web will eat through your flesh.”
I’m not going to sugar coat it. This is an extremely upsetting development.
Fine, I go back and instead make the apparently obviously correct choice to search grandma’s closet instead of under her bed. Obviously, this was the only way I could have avoided imminent death in this adventure entirely of my own choosing. Obviously.
You fling open the door.
And gasp!
“What is it?” Sophie asks, her voice trembling.
You turn to her, a terrified look on your face. “Grandma’s other clothes are even uglier than her purple-and-yellow outfit!”
In this timeline, I laugh, an innocent babe unaware of the many near misses I have had with death. My mortality remains a hypothetical concept. In my ignorance, I jest.
Andrew pushes aside the clothes and finds, in the back of the closet, a shoebox overflowing with human hands. But they’re fake. At last, a good old Goosebumps fake-out. Andrew searches another closet (what a nice guest bedroom!) and says he’s found feet, but before I can investigate, once again, we hear grandma.
Well, I know from my forbidden knowledge that staying in the room seems to be a fast-track to a flesh-eating acid cocoon. So my call is to go out the window and turn to page 106. But I also know from the real-life track record that Ariel is the only one who has ever made a decision that did not immediately result in our death. So, sorry, Ariel. I hope you’re not dead.